Privacy policy

1. Overview

BillWise ("we", "us", "our") is operated by WattMate Pty Ltd and is committed to protecting your privacy. This policy explains how we collect, use, store, and protect your personal information when you use the BillWise platform at billwise.com.au, including our energy calculators, bill analysis tools, installer marketplace, and recommendation engine.

2. Information we collect

Information you provide

• Account information: Name, email address, phone number (optional), postcode
• Energy data: Electricity bill amounts, usage patterns, household size, current energy systems
• Quote requests: Contact details and product interests submitted to receive installer quotes
• Bill uploads: Scanned or photographed electricity bills for analysis

Information collected automatically

• Usage data: Pages visited, features used, calculator inputs (anonymized), only with your cookie consent
• Device information: Browser type, operating system, screen size
• Cookies: Session cookies for authentication, preference cookies for theme/settings

3. How we use your information

• Provide personalised energy savings recommendations
• Analyse your electricity bills and identify savings opportunities
• Match you with WattMate Certified installers when you request quotes
• Send email updates about your recommendations (with your consent)
• Improve our calculators and tools using aggregated, anonymized data
• Prevent fraud and maintain platform security

4. Data sharing

We share your information only in these circumstances:

• Installer matching: When you request quotes, we share your name, contact details, postcode, and product interests with WattMate Certified installers via the WattMate platform (operated by the same entity, WattMate Pty Ltd)
• WattMate platform: Quote requests and lead data are processed through WattMate's installer management platform (wattmate.com.au), which is operated by WattMate Pty Ltd, the same company as BillWise. Installer onboarding and lead distribution happen there
• Legal requirements: We may disclose information if required by Australian law or valid legal process

We do not sell your personal information to third parties.

5. Third parties who process your data

We use the following service providers to run BillWise. Each processes data on our behalf, only for the purpose described, under a data processing agreement:

• Supabase: Hosts our database and handles account authentication. Sees all data you submit to BillWise (account details, bill data, quote requests)
• Resend: Delivers our transactional emails (verification codes, quote confirmations, savings recommendations). Sees your email address and the content of emails sent to you
• Vercel: Hosts the BillWise website. With your cookie consent, it also provides Vercel Analytics and Speed Insights, cookieless tools that count page views and measure page speed. No personally identifiable information is shared with them
• Twilio: Delivers SMS messages for phone number verification codes. Sees your phone number and the verification code sent to it
• Anthropic (Claude): When you upload a photographed or scanned bill, the image is sent to Anthropic's Claude models to read the bill's figures (an OCR step). Anthropic is also used, where enabled, to generate personalised savings-scenario suggestions from your bill data. Anthropic does not use this data to train its models under our commercial terms
• Sentry: Error-monitoring tool that helps us diagnose technical faults. It captures error and diagnostic data, which can include the contents of an error message. We mask identifiers in our own logging, but we do not warrant that no personal information ever reaches Sentry in an error report. With your cookie consent, Sentry can also record a replay of some visits (and of visits that hit an error) to show us what went wrong; the replay hides all text you see or type, and all images and media
• Google (Analytics / Ads): With your cookie consent, we run Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Ads tags to understand site usage and measure marketing performance. These load only after you accept analytics cookies in the cookie banner

Microsoft Clarity is different from the providers above. It loads only after you accept analytics cookies. It records how pages are used (session replay and heatmaps); what you type into form fields is always masked, but other text shown on the page can be recorded. Microsoft receives this data as an independent controller, not on our behalf, and may use it for its own purposes, including advertising profiles, as described in the Microsoft privacy statement. Declining, or withdrawing consent via “Cookie settings”, stops it.

Several of these providers store or process data on servers located outside Australia. Where that happens, we take reasonable steps consistent with Australian Privacy Principle 8 (cross-border disclosure) so your information continues to be handled in a way consistent with this policy.

6. Bill upload security

When you upload an electricity bill for analysis:

• A photographed or scanned bill is sent to Anthropic's Claude models to read its figures, over an encrypted connection. A digital PDF is read by our own parser instead
• The figures we read from your bill — including your NMI and account number where the bill shows them — are stored in your browser so you can return to your results. If you are signed in to a BillWise account they are also saved to your bill history on our servers, and they are included if you send us a quote request
• Identifiers such as your NMI, meter and account numbers are masked in our internal system logs
• To have bill data we hold removed, email admin@wattmate.com.au, or clear your browser storage for this site to remove the copy held there

7. Data retention

• Account data: Retained while your account is active. Deleted within 30 days of account closure
• Bill uploads: Held in your browser until you clear it. If you are signed in, a copy is also kept in your account's bill history on our servers. You can delete recent bills from your bill history in the app; to have any of it removed, email admin@wattmate.com.au. A copy sent with a quote request is kept with that request
• Calculator results: Stored in your browser session only (not on our servers) unless you create an account
• Lead/quote requests: Retained for 12 months for service quality and dispute resolution
• Analytics data: Aggregated and anonymized, retained indefinitely

8. Your rights

Under the Australian Privacy Act 1988, you have the right to:

• Access: Request a copy of all personal information we hold about you
• Correction: Request correction of inaccurate or incomplete information
• Deletion: Request deletion of your personal information by emailing admin@wattmate.com.au. If you hold a WattMate account, you can also request deletion from its privacy settings
• Opt-out: Unsubscribe from marketing emails at any time via the link in each email
• Complaint: Lodge a complaint with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC)

9. Cookies

We use essential cookies for:

• Authentication: Keeping you signed in
• Preferences: Remembering your theme (light/dark) and display settings
• Security: CSRF protection tokens
• Your progress: A first-party cookie that remembers where you are across our tools for 30 days (for example your postcode, your bill amount and the results of your last calculation), so you don't have to start again. It never holds your name or contact details and isn't used for analytics

Everything else waits for your consent in the cookie banner: Google Analytics and Google Ads tags (which set their own cookies), Microsoft Clarity session recordings and heatmaps (which also set their own cookies), Vercel Analytics and Speed Insights, Sentry session replays (see section 5), and an anonymous copy of the figures you enter in our calculators and bill analyser (such as postcode, bill amount and tariff, never your name or contact details), which we use for local averages. If you decline, none of these run. You can change your answer at any time with the “Cookie settings” link at the bottom of every page.

10. Security

We protect your data with:

• HTTPS encryption on all connections
• Row-level security on database tables
• CSRF protection on our quote, contact and phone-verification forms
• Content Security Policy and security headers
• Regular security reviews of our codebase

11. Children

BillWise is not intended for use by children under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. Significant changes will be communicated via email or a notice on our platform. Continued use of BillWise after changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

13. Decisions we make automatically

Some things happen without a person reviewing them one by one. Here is what software decides about you, and what it uses to decide.

• Which installer or installers receive your enquiry — using your postcode and suburb, the type of job you asked about, any brand you mentioned, and how complete your enquiry is. It is matched against installers who cover your area, offer that work, hold current accreditation and licensing with us, and have capacity. Among those, we rotate so one installer does not take every enquiry in a suburb, and installers with stronger review histories rank slightly higher.
• A quality score for your enquiry — using how much you told us — whether we have your name, email, phone, address, energy usage or bill details, and whether your phone number was verified. It sets how your enquiry is prioritised and reported internally.
• The figures in any assessment or report we produce for you — using your usage, bill, roof and appliance details, run through the same published Western Australian assumptions for every customer — sunlight hours, tariffs, rebate rules and equipment pricing.

Your score does not change what an installer pays. Every lead is the same flat referral fee, so a more detailed enquiry never costs them more, and we have nothing to gain from scoring you higher.

Where you upload a bill or a photo, AI reads the figures off it. It does not decide anything — the numbers it extracts feed the same calculations as figures typed in by hand, and you can correct them before anything is sent.

We do not make automated decisions about your credit, your eligibility for a rebate, or anything that could deny you a service. Rebate eligibility is a published rule applied to what you told us, and we show you the reasoning.

If you think an automated decision got something wrong — the wrong installer, the wrong figures, or an enquiry that went nowhere — email admin@wattmate.com.au and a person will look at it and can redo it manually.

14. Contact

For privacy questions or to exercise your rights, contact us at:

• Email: admin@billwise.com.au
• Or use our contact form